Atom Computing builds computers on Neutral atom qubits. Individual ytterbium atoms are trapped in a grid of optical tweezers, tightly focused laser beams that each hold one atom in place. Qubits live in long-lived nuclear spin states. Two-qubit gates work by briefly exciting a pair of nearby atoms to a Rydberg state, where their electron clouds get large enough to interact.
Adding qubits mostly means adding more tweezer sites. That let Atom Computing announce a 1,180-qubit system in 2023. The company has since partnered with Microsoft to pair its hardware with Microsoft's error-correction software.